


it will not reconstruct

by badacts



Category: All For the Game - Nora Sakavic
Genre: M/M, Only Vague Though, Torture, Violence, slight AU
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-09-06
Updated: 2016-09-06
Packaged: 2018-08-13 08:40:40
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,047
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7969921
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/badacts/pseuds/badacts
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It doesn't change anything. Or, Neil catches a clue on the bus to Binghamton.</p>
            </blockquote>





	it will not reconstruct

**Author's Note:**

> I love parallels. Title from Hotel Emergencies, a poem by Bill Manhire.
> 
> Cross-posted from tumblr, where I was prompted to write about what would happen if Neil confessed that he thought his relationship with Andrew was important to him earlier.

It doesn’t change anything.

It doesn’t change anything that Neil watches the sun-gilded lines of Andrew’s face in the back of a bus going to Binghamton like he’s a question and an answer all in one. It doesn’t matter that Andrew looks back and sees the quiet realisation in his eyes, and says, “Stop.”

Neil says, “I’m not doing anything.”

“I told you not to look at me like that.” _I am not your answer and you sure as fuck aren’t mine._ Neil’s inability to listen is something that Andrew despises.

“Is it exhausting seeing everything as a fight?” Neil asks, brow furrowing gently.

“Not as exhausting as running from everything must be.” Running was never an option for Andrew, but the skittish creature he’d almost broken in Arizona had looked just that.

“Maybe. I told you I’m working on that.”

“Work harder.” Andrew is the one who’d scraped Neil off the sidewalk outside the stadium the morning after his bloody birthday gift. Neil was so close to bolting then that the itch under his skin had nearly been catching. It hasn’t been long enough for Neil’s words to be anything other than wishful thinking.

“I can’t unless you let me go. Stand with me, but don’t fight for me. Let me learn to fight for myself,” Neil says softly, his chin curved over his forearm on the back of the seat. There’s an honesty in his face that Andrew still barely recognises, and isn’t sure he can trust.

He says, “I knew I’d look out for only me when the world went to hell.” He says, “I don’t want to be that person anymore.” He says, “I want to go back for you.”

He wants to go back for Andrew because his brain works in terms of  _how much am I worth and what can that buy me._ He wants to be the soldier throwing his body on the grenade, the martyr in a crown of thorns. He and Andrew aren’t alike that way either - these days Andrew wants to live as well as win.

Andrew has to look away when he says, “Don’t come crying to me when someone breaks your face,” because he hates Neil, hates the appearance of gratitude and the way he says  _thank you._  Hates the feeling of letting him go.

Neil starts to talk then, looking out the window with his cheek nestled in his elbow. For all his relaxation as he talks cities, talks travel, there’s a bare hint of tension nestled at the back of his throat. Whether it’s remembered or belongs to this moment, Andrew isn’t sure.

He listens, first. Then, at Neil’s prompting, talks himself. It’s nothing interesting, but Neil drinks it up like it’s water and he’s dying of thirst. Ironic, considering he already knows more about Andrew than most.

When Abby pulls over for a break and the other Foxes unload, the two of them stay. Neil watches Wymack pause and then leave without saying anything.

“I really want to know when Coach figured this out,” he says, because he clearly hasn’t realised yet how good Wymack is at seeing through people. If he had, he would be a fuck of a lot more wary of him.

It amazes Andrew that Neil can listen to him say  _it isn’t a this_  and still give his little speech about how the upperclassmen shouldn’t bet on his sexuality because  _the only one I’m interested in is you_. Andrew kisses him because he asks for it without words, his hands so gentle around the curve of Andrew’s skull that he has to introduce teeth, to grip at Neil’s thigh a little too hard.

Neil breaks it but doesn’t pull away. Close enough his breath plays over Andrew’s jaw, sweet with the candy he accepted from Nicky but made a face over as he ate it, he says, “This is a ‘this’. To me.”

Andrew still wants to kiss him. He wants to hurt him, too - to make him take that back, to spit blood over it. To replace that touch of vulnerability in his eyes with pain, because that’s all that Andrew is good for.

Andrew’s hands are made for that, but his words can do it just as well. He says, “It isn’t anything to me,” in the voice of a man who only deals in the truth while his empty palms itch, and watches Neil’s expression close down.

It doesn’t change anything. Except that the moment Andrew releases his clutching, crawling hands from around Kevin’s throat with the truths he’s wrung out still ringing in his ears, he thinks:  _he’s gone into his grave with me a liar._

 

* * *

 

Neil is used to caring about things that will never care about him. Life, for example.

_Hello, Junior. Do you remember me?_

_They don’t have a choice. We can’t kill them, but we can hurt them. You’ll see._

He promised Andrew that he would stand his ground here, swore it for Kevin’s sake and his own. But he can’t do that knowing his teammates will bleed over it. He can’t when he looks into Romero Malcolm’s face with the Foxes oblivious all around him, and sees him reach for his gun.

Neil, his heart silent in his chest, would kill the whole world to see the people he cares about safe. The words  _it isn’t anything to me_  don’t come into it for him.

He gives himself over. Neil Josten has always been a dead man walking. He stopped caring about life a while ago anyway.

The opposite - or twin, maybe - of that example comes over to look him in the face, his stare a demand. And Neil has nothing to give him anymore that he hasn’t already ( _this is a this. To me)._

He doesn’t regret that. Actually, he’s almost happy. For Neil, who has always had - who has always _been_  - nothing, Andrew has always been enough. He’d hate to walk into his grave knowing that it isn’t something Andrew can shrug off. 

And Neil owes him for tonight. Probably for more than that ( _keys, trust, honesty, kisses_ ). Because he’s never going to be able to give the promised  _anything_ , he says, “Thank you. You were amazing.”

There’s shelter in resignation. There’s relief in knowing that when he’s gone, they’ll keep going. For once, he can think  _no one will care if I die_  and be gently grateful for that rather than just…tired.

If he cares enough about the Foxes to retreat into them, to find solace in them and what they’ve given him, while Lola tries her best to break him apart - then only he knows about it.

Clacking sticks with Kevin on the court, triumph burning in his blood. Wymack stopping him from fracturing in the aftermath of his trip to Evermore. Andrew making him a bargain, kissing him hard enough to bruise, handing over even a tiny semblance of control to Neil in the form of hands against skin.

Neil Josten is a dead man walking. Nathaniel Wesninski says goodbye to him and everyone else burnt and bloody in a car on the way to meet his father. 

 

* * *

 

Neil Josten is a dead man walking. It’s a hand on the back of his neck in a hotel room in Baltimore that brings him back.

 

* * *

 

Neil wakes up halfway through the night, in pain but not afraid. He can still taste the truth on his tongue from hours ago. He feels empty inside like he’s poured everything out.

It feels strange to lie so near other people again. Matt is a sleep-hot presence against his back, and he can feel Renee curled up a few inches from his head. The room is quiet other than the soft sounds each of his teammates make in slumber.

At some point in his sleep he’s curled his injured fingers into Andrew’s shirt hard enough to hurt himself.

Subconscious fear, then, maybe. He loosens his grip and looks up, finds himself being watched.

Andrew is awake. That isn’t particularly surprising - Neil can’t imagine the man asleep with so many other people this close. Too many unexpected touches like Neil’s to relax that much.

 _Get away from us. If you make me repeat myself you will not live to regret it._ The tentative press of Neil’s fingers against Andrew’s heart, wordlessly allowed.

_You aren’t going anywhere. You’re staying with us._

_Leave Nathaniel buried in Baltimore with his father._

No sensible man would look at the wreck of Neil, still breathing and broken like Nathaniel, and tell him he could stay. Andrew, who is sensible to the point of seeming brutal, did it anyway. He also risked a bullet to put himself within arm’s reach of Neil, looking like he would burn the world down to preserve the right to touch Neil for him alone even though it was much too late for that. He looked some feds in the face and said he and the other Foxes would never let Neil quietly disappear, a threat and a promise.

Neil would never call Andrew a liar, but his actions might have proven the phrase _it isn’t anything to me_ wrong anyway.

Near-death situations are good for realizations: Neil would know.

Here and now, he doesn’t let go. He murmurs indistinctly, halfway between a request for permission to touch and a request for something else entirely, “Can I…”

His voice fades out. He’s already most of the way back to sleep. Andrew, all focus, says, “Yes.”

 

* * *

 

Andrew doesn’t lose control. Ever.

That’s why he could hear Neil say _I’m sorry_ in Baltimore, and not make him bleed over it. That’s why he could stay awake all night like some kind of sentinel, and not even flinch when Neil grasped his shirt firmly enough his brow furrowed.

That’s why he’s here right now, wrapping the man in question in enough plastic to cover all of his hurts, and why he can think _they do this with dead bodies too_ without feeling anything.

A loss of control sounds like _please_. Andrew Minyard isn’t that anymore. He’s something else entirely.

He’d wondered, though, if the people who’d stolen Neil had managed to force that word out of him. That’s what he thinks of when he presses his fingers against Neil’s scars in the humidity of the bathroom, right before he pushes that thought away.

Neil says, “Hey,” to make Andrew look to him, leans in.

Andrew wants to hurt him, still. He kisses him instead.

His hand goes to Neil’s throat and doesn’t tighten like it wants to, feeling his pulse thrum _here, here, here_ through the skin. He says, right up against his mouth, “You are a mess.”

Neil pulls back a fraction. “What else is new?”

Andrew goes to move him to start the shower, gets caught when he doesn’t give ground. He should probably be less surprised by that habit by now.

Neil says, “You still think this isn’t anything?”

Andrew edges him a look, wants to say _don’t ask questions you know the answer to_. Doesn’t say anything at all.

“I don’t have any secrets left to trade for our game, but you could give me a few turns seeing as I gave up the last ones for free." 

“No one forced you to do that.”

“I wouldn’t have told them if they had.” Neil shrugs, making the plastic rustle as he casually references the torture that left his arms marked like that. Andrew doesn’t understand him sometimes, but this isn’t one of those times.

He says, “Fine. Two questions.”

“Including the last one?”

Andrew ignores that – he hates quibbling. Neil’s mouth quirks and then smooths out again.

“Andrew,” he says, ungentle. Not forceful, just focussed, and if it’s ironic that a liar like him is so keen to hear the truth then he obviously doesn’t recognise that. “Yes or no?" 

It’s not very specific. _Yes, I still think this isn’t anything? No, I don’t?_ Thankfully for Neil, Andrew knows the kind of answer he’s looking for. It is, after all, his question.

He thinks about lying. He thinks about telling a truth that turns into a lie. He thinks _he’s gone into the grave with me a liar_ , lets that wash over him again, and then says, “Yes.”


End file.
